If you fol­lowed the ad­vice in last month’s col­umn and be­gan doc­u­ment­ing and ob­tain­ing writ­ten au­thor­i­ty for ques­tion­able di­rec­tives, you may have al­ready no­ticed the tem­per­a­ture change.

If T&T does ne­go­ti­ate new en­er­gy con­tracts with Venezuela, both coun­tries would have to get rid of the pre­vi­ous con­tracts that were signed and ne­go­ti­ate new ones that would ben­e­fit Venezuela and not on­ly T&T.

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Roodal Mooni­lal has sig­nalled a re­set in this coun­try’s ap­proach to re­gion­al en­er­gy diplo­ma­cy, ad­mit­ting that pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tions failed to syn­chro­nise T&T’s hy­dro­car­bons strat­e­gy with de­vel­op­ments in Guyana and Suri­name.

From be­ing con­sid­ered too much for lo­cal stages, to mak­ing waves across the Caribbean through fa­cade de­signs.

De­spite per­sis­tent myths, cre­ators in Trinidad and To­ba­go and across the wider Caribbean can earn di­rect­ly from YouTube. The idea that Caribbean coun­tries are ex­clud­ed from mon­eti­sa­tion is sim­ply in­cor­rect.

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

Af­ter years of ef­fort, Trinidad and To­ba­go has been of­fi­cial­ly re­moved from the Eu­ro­pean Union’s list of non-co­op­er­a­tive ju­ris­dic­tions for tax pur­pos­es, fol­low­ing a de­ci­sion by the EU’s Eco­nom­ic and Fi­nan­cial Af­fairs Coun­cil on Tues­day.

Rum punch is a part of Caribbean cul­ture; a con­cept that US-based busi­ness­woman Mari­am Fedai un­der­stands all too well.

France’s Am­bas­sador to Trinidad and To­ba­go, Guil­laume Pierre, has out­lined an am­bi­tious agen­da to ex­pand French in­vest­ment in this coun­try, with en­er­gy, in­fra­struc­ture, lo­gis­tics, and ad­vanced tech­nol­o­gy at the cen­tre of the bi­lat­er­al re­la­tion­ship.

With the 50th Reg­u­lar Meet­ing of the Con­fer­ence of Heads of Gov­ern­ment of the Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (Cari­com) fast-ap­proach­ing, an un­com­fort­able re­al­i­ty hangs over this high-pro­file mo­ment in re­gion­al pol­i­tics: The bloc — com­pris­ing 14 sov­er­eign mem­ber states — has be­come mired in a clash of for­eign pol­i­cy out­looks.

Methanol pro­duc­tion re­mains a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of T&T’s down­stream en­er­gy sec­tor, con­tribut­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly to man­u­fac­tur­ing out­put, for­eign ex­change earn­ings, and em­ploy­ment. Lever­ag­ing its nat­ur­al gas re­sources, the coun­try has es­tab­lished it­self as one of the world’s lead­ing ex­porters of methanol, with pro­duc­tion large­ly ori­ent­ed to­ward in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets. As a val­ue-added, gas-based in­dus­try, methanol plays an im­por­tant role in sup­port­ing in­dus­tri­al ac­tiv­i­ty be­yond the ex­trac­tive in­dus­try.

On Fri­day, the US Trea­sury De­part­ment Of­fice of For­eign As­sets Con­trol (OFAC) an­nounced the is­suance of two gen­er­al li­cences that al­low Shell and BP to pro­ceed with near-bor­der and cross-bor­der de­vel­op­ment the Drag­on and Cocuina gas fields.

Last week Mon­day, a team from the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) con­clud­ed its mis­sion to Port-of-Spain and Scar­bor­ough, dur­ing which they held dis­cus­sions with the T&T au­thor­i­ties on the 2026 Ar­ti­cle IV con­sul­ta­tion .